


The Impossible Dream House of Lost Things

by Bishopsbird



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Dreams, M/M, Magical Realism, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-20
Packaged: 2017-12-04 15:43:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bishopsbird/pseuds/Bishopsbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is what everyone knows: </p><p>The Dream comes before death, or it is death. It doesn’t come when you’re looking for it. The Collector gives you one day, one chance, one lost thing. Be careful, and don’t look out the windows.</p><p>The Dream came for John in London.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

John had thought he’d had the Dream many times when he was in Afghanistan. 

Before he was shot, he dreamed of sun and sand and shooting. He would wake up from these dreams in a start, the sheets soaked with sweat.

After, in the hospital, he’d slept more often than he was awake, falling into long, confusing dreams where he’d walked through endless hallways, his path obscured by thick layers of smoke and fog. Sometimes his parents were there with him, sometimes Harry, pulling at his sleeve and trying to tell him something that he could never quite catch. Other times there would be a dark shadowy figure who seemed like he could be the Collector, and time and time again John had thought _this is it, this is the dream_.

But he’d always woken up with nothing in his hands, just the line of the IV snaking up from his arm and the beeping of the array of medical equipment that loomed over his bed like a silent mechanical forest. Dream corridors built by pain and morphine, nothing more.

**

John went to stay with Harry when he first got back, though they both knew it couldn’t last.

She’d moved to a smaller flat after splitting up with Clara. Just a bedroom for herself and a large room off of it that served as kitchen, living room, and dining room all at once. John kipped on the couch in there the first night and woke up twice, his leg and shoulder twin coals of fire pulsing under his skin.

The next day they went shopping, because John didn’t have any clothes really, except what they’d given him when he was discharged, and in the evening Harry made pasta for dinner.

It was hard in the middle, but not al dente—more like Harry hadn’t boiled it long enough. The meatballs, as if to make up for this, were burnt.

John ate slowly, pausing frequently to rub his leg under the table. He was still getting used to his leg, and his shoulder, and the crutch.

It would take time, to accept and embrace his new limits and challenges, that was the language the doctor had used. To John, limits was too weak a word—it was a narrowing, instead, his world collapsing on itself until it was no bigger than the places he could hobble to on his crutches. Things John had done before without thinking—walking up the stairs to the shopping center, holding his shopping bags in one hand while opening the door for Harry with the other—had suddenly become impossible. He wondered if it would always feel like this, the crutch a chain constraining his movements, or if he would become so used to it that the crutch would feel like part of him, like another limb.

“You like it?” Harry asked. It was the point in the evening where she was still drinking soda, diet coke from a can, the sides shiny with beaded moisture from the refrigerator.

John gave her a noncommittal nod, and Harry took a large gulping drink of her coke, slurping like she’d used to do when they were kids.

The war was out as a topic of conversation, and Clara was out as well, which didn’t leave them with a lot to talk about. Soon John would resort to asking Harry about her job—she was an accountant—and then they’d know things were really getting desperate.  

John cast his eyes around the room, searching for another topic of conversation. The walls were mostly bare, just a framed photograph of the Watson family on one wall and a new television mounted on the other. 

“Like what you’ve done with the place,” John said.

“Clara chose most of the furniture at our old place," Harry said. "I thought I’d let her keep it.” Harry slurped her coke again and took her knife in hand, stabbing almost violently at a meatball.

Wonderful, John thought. So much for avoiding Clara.

He cast about for something else. The family photograph again—taken on a trip to Majorca when Harry was ten and John was at what his mum called his awkward stage, all knees and elbows and a bad home done hair cut—jogged his memory.

“Where’s Peter?” he asked.

Harry shifted awkwardly in her seat. Avoiding his eyes. “Peter?”

“Yeah,” John said, remembering. Harry’s living arrangements had gone on a upward trajectory from grubby student-y bedsits to the more adult flats she had shared with Clara, but one thing had always remained the same—that stuffed rabbit, his fur increasingly grey and dirty, perched on the top of her television like an ornament.  “He’s always on the telly, every place you’ve got you did that. I guess now that you've got one of those new flat screens you can’t, but you should still—”

“I lost him.”

“What?”

Harry had said this quietly, her month full of meatball. Now she repeated herself, speaking more clearly but still not meeting his eyes. “I lost him. During the move with Clara to the new place last year. You were still in Afghanistan, remember? The movers probably lost him. Or Clara threw him out or something. I don’t know. I put him in the box marked entertainment room, and you how movers are. They lost like, ten of Clara’s DVDs, and broke six plates, including the one Aunt Marie gave us for the wedding and—”

“You lost him?”

Harry continued right over him, as though he hadn’t said anything. “And Clara said she’d sue, get someone at her firm to help to do it, because the china was a couple hundred pounds at least—”

“You lost your Lost Thing.”

Harry finally met his eyes. “Yeah,” she said flatly.

John breathed out, a sigh. He heard his mum in the back of his head like an echo, _Oh Harry_ _so typical_ and then all of a sudden the absurdity of it struck him, and he couldn’t stop laughing, his shoulders shaking with it. Harry joined him, and their laughter mingled together. He hadn’t laughed with that since he got back, and it felt good.

After that, it was better. They talked about Mum, and school, and the time John got punched in the face for fighting with a boy who’d called Harry a slag when she dated him for a month before she went off with his sister.

He went to bed thinking that maybe it could work. That maybe getting sent back to England wasn’t the end of everything.

He was almost asleep when Harry slinked into the kitchen. A creak as the fridge opened. Ice cracked out of trays, then low clink of vodka hitting against ice cubes, like a delayed echo to Harry’s earlier slurping of her coke.

John closed his eyes tighter as if this could shut out the sound, and turned on his side. Pretended not to hear.

He was a fool.

**

The Dream had come for Harry when she was eight.

John, six, had been old enough to know what was going on but not why his parents had been so upset.

Everyone talked about the Dream at school, and everyone knew what you had to do. Finding your Lost Thing sounded like an adventure to John, and when he had gone to Harry’s bedroom before breakfast to ask if he could borrow her astronomy book for show and tell only to find Harry lying silent and non-responsive in her bed—her eyes open but not seeing him—he’d been excited. He’d run into his parents’ bedroom yelling, “Harry’s having the Dream! Harry’s having the Dream!”

He’d been too little to understand why Mum had started crying, why Dad put his arm around her and told her it was going to be okay, of course it was.

“It’s Peter, right?” John had asked. “Peter is her Lost Thing.”

Mum looked up, her shoulders still shaking. “Peter?”

“Harry lost Peter at the picnic. She remembered she’d lost him in the bus on the drive home, but the driver wouldn’t let her go back.” John remembered this day clearly, the sweetness of the ice cream they'd served at lunch still on his tongue, Harry with her stuffed rabbit in one hand as through the festivities until, suddenly, the rabbit wasn’t there.

“The school picnic was two weeks ago,” John’s father said. “You remember,” he said, turning to Mum, “Harry was upset for days about that rabbit. We promised she’d get a new toy for Christmas. She’s going to find it.”

But Mum wouldn’t stop crying.

John wasn’t worried.

Kids almost always Came Back, everyone knew that. It wasn’t like the Collector was unfair. And besides, this was Harry, his sister. Of course she would Come Back. Harry was the best at finding things, the best at everything, ever, John knew this with a six-year-old's unshakable certainty. 

John’s mum had cried all day, until her eyes were red and hurt-looking. No one made John go to school, and so he’d sat on the couch all day watching telly, eating a bag of crisps he'd taken from the kitchen—usually he’d be yelled at for this, but today no one seemed to mind—waiting for his sister to come back to him.

John had been right. Sometime between _Doctor Who_ and the evening news Harry woke up. During later family recountings of Harry's Dream, Mum always prefaced this portion of the tale by explaing that she had been by Harry's side almost all day, so of course it was the one moment that she’d stepped away that Harry choose to open her eyes. 

John had been the first to see her. He’d gone to the kitchen to look for more snacks, when Harry had come bounding down the streets from her bedroom upstairs, swinging Peter in one small hand.

John stood up from the cupboard, a packet of chocolate covered biscuits in one hand.

“Look,” Harry said to him, holding out Peter. “There was a house and loads and loads of junk—way more than Grandpa has, even—and this man said I had to look for what I’d lost, and I found Peter. I told the bus driver he shouldn’t have left him.”

John looked down at the rabbit. Wherever he’d been, he didn’t look the worse for it—same dirty fur and the messed up ear that Harry had chewed on when she was a baby.

“Cool,” John had said. “Want a biscuit?”

Harry took two, and grinned at John, her teeth smeared with chocolate.

“Was it scary?” John asked.

Harry shook her head, an emphatic no. “The man at the door said I was pretty.”

She opened her mouth, half-full with cookie. She was about to say something more, but then Mum swept into the room, and everything became a jumble of tears and Harry telling everyone about the house and the rabbit and John sneaking another chocolate biscuit during all the commotion.

**

Later, John understood that—his Mum’s tears aside—it was about as safe a Dream as you could have.  A child under ten, a recently lost and beloved toy: hard data was difficult to come by, but everyone agreed that it was pretty much the ideal.

Kids almost always Came Back.

They were more resilient, more open minded, some theories said. They simply hadn’t had as much time to lose things, other theories went, so when the Dream came for them it was easier for them to remember what they’d lost. Some people claimed children lost physical things—a book, a toy, candies—and yearned for them with a intensity that burned that the missing objects into their memories, while adults yearned for the intangible. Nature’s way, some claimed, of ensuring that the child would remember the item and Come Back.

John didn’t know which theory was true.

He just knew that Harry had the ideal Dream, slipping away so that she was still young enough to find the quest an adventure. Harry had the Dream before she was old enough to worry about when she would get it, if she would be ready, if she would be able to find what she had lost.

For a long time, there were whispers at school. Kids talked about who had Dreamed and who hadn’t and what everyone's Lost Things were. There was this girl from Manchester,  everyone said, whose Lost Thing had been a ham sandwich—gross!—and there was Colin, a boy in the form above him, who hadn’t Come Back at all. John had run into Colin's mum at the shops sometimes, picking her way through groceries with a blankness in her eyes that said she wasn't really seeing them, until Colin’s family had moved away—and there was Tim, whose Lost Thing was a magazine he’d swiped from his dad, with pictures of women that he’d show to you if you gave him a pound, and so on.

And then the whispers had changed, melted into who was going to be at what party, and who was going to uni and who had a job in town, as one by one more and more of his friends had the Dream. The Dream didn’t come for everyone, not by a long shot, but as people got older, they stopped talking about it. It was one thing for a fifteen year old to admit to not having had the Dream, quite another if you were thirty.

The Dream never came for John.

For long time he’d been jealous. He hadn’t joined the army because of the Dream, but it was part of why he'd enlisted. Discrimination against people who hadn’t had the Dream was officially illegal--no one could ask about it at an interview. But companies had ways of finding out if you’d had the Dream anyway.

It upset John, but he understood it. Who’d want to hire someone for a position of responsibility only to have him go to sleep one night and never Come Back?

The jobs wasn’t the worse thing, anyway. Forget about employers: John stopped trying to have a serious relationship when he stopped being able to count the number of people who’d broken it off with him when told them he hadn’t had the Dream on both hands. Even worse, John understood this as well. Who would want to build a life with someone who could disappear at any minute? Everyone knew that the chances of Coming Back went way down if you haven’t had the Dream by age thirty.

In the army, they didn't mind so much. Soldiers were used to seeing people disappear in the night.

So, yeah, John had been jealous, just a bit, of Harry’s perfect Dream, of how the Dream—an ordeal for so many—had been just a game to her. Just like life had been a game to Harry, as she seemed to glide smoothly from school to uni and then to her first job in a happy haze of parties and drinking and laughter.

It was when the parties stopped but the drinking didn’t, and Harry’s life went into free fall like a long-delayed awake up from a long slumber, that John finally stopped being jealous.

He understood it now: The Dream had been so easy for Harry to make up for the fact that was so much of everything that came after it wasn’t.

**

John moved out three weeks later. His pension wasn’t really enough for him to afford London, but he knew that he couldn’t stay with Harry, and going home to Mum and Dad would be giving up completely, so where else could he go?

London would be large enough to lose himself in. Large enough to start over.

Harry drove him into the city, and helped him move his things. It wasn’t much—he had the clothes he’d bought with Harry, and his computer. Some books.

He’d rented a room in central London, in a clean, institutional-looking building. The stubborn cleanliness of its hallways seemed an affront to London’s grime, and the resolute cheer of the woman who took his deposit and gave him his keys made John more depressed than rudeness would have.

He remembered the rooms he’d rented as a student--dank and dirty, yes, but full of noise and life, with someone always just about to knock on his door and ask if he wanted to pop down to the pub for a drink. John had somehow thought this would be the same, which was ridiculous. No one was going to be knocking on his door in this place.

It only took them three trips to get his things up. It shouldn’t have even taken that many, but because John couldn’t carry anything that required two hands because of his crutch, Harry had to take almost everything up while he leaned on his crutch watching her, useless. 

The logistics of moving kept the silence between them at bay, barely. In the last trip up in the elevator—the room cost more because of it, but John couldn’t face the thought of trying to navigate a walk-up with his leg—the scraps of _will you move this, okay, I’m coming, hold the door_ fell away, and they stared at each other like strangers.

Finally there was nothing more to be done.

Harry put John’s computer on the room's small utilitarian table, then turned to John, who was sitting on the bed, and straightened the covers, a reflexive, homely movement that reminded him of their Mum. “Well, that’s the last of it,” she said.

“Thanks for helping,” John said. “I know it’s probably not your idea of a fun day off from work and all.”

“John,” Harry said, “if it’s the money, you know, I could always—”

“It’ll be fine. There’s lots of things, locum work, hospitals.”

Silence for a moment, the bleakness of the room around them like an invisible partner in their conversation.

Finally, Harry, her face flushed: “You don’t have to move out.”

Christ. His leg was aching again. John just wanted this to be over. “Yes I do.”

“I’ll stop. I promise. You can stay, and I’ll stop, and—”

“Harry,” John said, “It’s fine.”

Harry brushed her hair from her face, her eyes wet.

“I’ll be fine.”

**

John read for a while after Harry left, opened his computer, looked at some news sites, then called up the blog he’d set up a couple of days ago using a free online programme. The therapist he’d seen in the army hospital had recommended that he try writing, said it might help. So far that advice had been as useless as the referral note the therapist had given John when he’d been released, but with the silence of the empty room hanging heavy around him, he figured he might as well try again.

He stared at the page for a while, the cursor blinking rhythmically, taunting him.

What was he thinking? He had nothing to write about. Nothing ever happened to him.

John shut down the computer, and went to bed.

**

He woke up in a forest.

John instantly knew that something was going on.

He had had false alarms before. There had been the dreams in the hospital of course, and there was that time in uni when, sleeping off the effects of some very potent pot, he’d had a dream about Prince Charles in a clown costume leading him on an epic quest for Maltesers that was so vivid he was convinced for a while that this was what the Dream really was like for everyone, and that the whole county had been subjecting him to some sort of elaborate joke.

But this was different.

The air crackled with energy. A sharp, spikey thrill of electricity ran through John’s veins, like the moment of anticipation that hangs between the handing out of tests and signal to begin writing.

The ground was thick with moss. John thought he could hear movement in the underbrush, rustling like birds or small mammals, but whenever he turned his head to look, he saw nothing but trees and bushes. Above him, the sun radiated down onto the trees with a heat John hadn’t felt since Afghanistan. Wherever he was, it wasn’t London.

John started walking.

He found the house in a meadow, and knew instantly—the way you do in dreams—that this was his destination.

A man waited for him at the door. He was short, no taller than John, dressed in a dark suit whose clean, restrained cut matched his neat, even features. Everything about the man was neat, from his short, tidy hair to the way his brows knitted together as he smiled at John.

This, clearly, was the Collector.

When he spoke, it was teasing, almost playful, with an accent John couldn’t place. “Took your time, didn’t you.” Not a question.

“I’m sorry,” John said, not sure whether he was making an apology or asking for an explanation. When neither seemed to be forthcoming, he continued, “I don’t understand. This is—”

“Typical,” the Collector said.

“What?”

“That you don’t understand.” The Collector’s smile became a sneer. “People like you don’t, generally.”

John wasn’t sure whether to be confused or offended. What did he mean, _People like him?_ “This is the Dream, right?”

The Collector pursed his lips, frowning. “I imagine you know the rules, at least? Someone who comes here as old as you?” The upswing at the end of this sentence turned it into a question, if barely one. John got the sense that the situation would become unpleasant if he said no.

“I know the—”

“Still, it doesn’t matter. Have to tell them to you anyway. Rules are rules.” The Collector sighed, his demeanor that of someone who’d been asked to fill out an unnecessary and very long form at the post office.

John had heard the rules before, of course, but hearing them in the Dream was different. It was how John imagined vows might feel as you were getting married—ceremonial words that had almost lost all their meaning, now re-imbued with power when for the first time they applied to you.

His Lost Thing was somewhere in the house. He had until sundown to find it, and present it to the Collector. Be careful, and don’t look out the windows.

Opening the door for John, the Collector added, “The forest is different once you’re inside.”

John paused. The door was open, and he could see into the house where a heap of things lay mixed about on the floor. Was that his old Christmas jumper sticking out from under a book? John itched to get inside, but: The last statement, about the forest. That wasn’t in the rules. He’d never heard anyone tell him about that.

“What’s different about the forest?” John asked, pausing halfway into the house. Around him, the forest was green, and silent, no different than any other woods.

The Collector’s answering grin made John’s skin crawl. The memory of Harry telling him that the Collector had told her she was pretty flashed into his mind, and John couldn’t stop himself from shuddering.

“Daylight’s wasting, Johnny boy,” the Collector said, turning his eyes up to where the sun hung high in the sky. “In you pop.”

The sun glinted off the Collector's tie pin, which sparked silver in the light. John suddenly couldn’t wait to get away from him. He stepped into the house.

“That’s the spirit,” the Collector said. “Remember, you have one chance to bring me something. No wrong items. I despise guessing.” Drawing out the last word like an expletive, the Collector stepped away, and swung the door shut behind him.

John was inside. 


	2. Chapter 2

The house was larger than it looked from the outside, the front door opening on to a long hallway flanked on either side by a series of large, wood-paneled rooms. At the end of the hall, two floor length windows drew in the sunlight, and despite the Collector’s warning, John’s eyes were immediately drawn to them, taking in the vague outline of trees through the glass before he tore his gaze away.

John was reminded of a story one of his teachers had told him about a spell that no one could make because it required you to stir the potion while not thinking of a pink elephant.

Forget about the windows, John told himself. You’ve got one day to find whatever it is you’ve lost, so don’t waste it.

Reminded of his task, John refocused his attention on the pile of things cluttering the floor.

Harry had said the house had more junk than Grandpa—who had seemingly had kept everything he’d ever acquired as if to make up for the fact that he’d returned from World War II without his hearing in one ear—and she was right.

There were rings and toothbrushes and books and letters and coins. Letters. Literally thousands of socks. Pen caps. Things that seemed normal for children to lose (balls, toys, friendship bracelets); things that seemed normal for adults to lose (wallets, loose change, bills, papers). More unusual items filled the room as well, popping up here and there like mushrooms in a field of grass: A stuffed deer dressed in a vest and standing on its hind legs holding a plastic musket as though it were about to take revenge on a group of invisible hunters; A shawl made out of butterfly wings; Even, buckling under the weight of an entire set of encyclopedias piled on top of it, a grand piano.

And somewhere, mixed in with the forgotten possessions of a thousand strangers was John’s Lost Thing.

The jumper in the bottom of the first pile turned out to be large and pale blue with three grey wolves howling at the moon on its front—nothing John had ever owned. 

John discarded it and worked through the pile, moving quickly to a box full of credit card bills and other papers when he saw nothing that he recognized.

This new box also contained nothing familiar, and John cast it away in frustration, trying to determine what object was most likely to be his Lost Thing.  

A person’s Lost Thing wasn’t always something that had just gone missing; it could be an object that the person had lost years, or even decades ago; John had read an article in the _Daily Mail_ while he was staying with Harry about an eighty-year-old man who had Come Back from the Dream triumphantly clutching a bundle of love letters that his long-deceased wife had sent him fifty years before. But this was rare: most people came to the Dream a couple of days to no more than two months after they’d lost something important to them.

One item came to mind as a possible contender: Harry’s phone. John had lost it about a week before he decided he couldn’t face living with Harry anymore. In fact, the fight that ensued after he lost it had in large part precipitated his decision to leave.

**

John was running errands in town when it happened.

He had these, long boring stretches of time during the day when the walls of Harry’s flat seemed to close around him like a vise. When he couldn’t face another episode of Connie Prince’s makeover show on the telly without wanting to scratch his brains out, he would go round to the shops and pick up items Harry left for him on a little list.

About a week after he’d arrived, Harry had given him her old phone so that they could communicate with her during these trips. Clara had given her the latest model right before they split up, Harry explained, and it would be a shame to waste it.

But John hated the phone. He hated the technical features which he could never quite figure out how to use (texting and taking photographs should be enough, he thought) and he hated even more the sad _Clara xxx_ on the back, a reminder of how badly both the Watson children had failed at maintaining relationships.

So he hadn’t been that sad when he lost it somewhere between Marks & Spenser and the chemist, only a bit worried that Harry would be upset.

Upset would be an understatement, John decided, as he watched as Harry’s face had reddened with rage when John told her about the phone that evening.

“That phone was really expensive,” Harry told him.

“I know, Harry,” John said. “I’m sorry. I’ll go round to the shops tomorrow and see if anyone’s turned it in.”

“Don’t be stupid. No one will. It’s gone.”

Why was she so angry? She hadn’t wanted to keep the phone at all; she been the one who had given it away to him. But maybe that was point: giving the phone to John let her throw it away without really losing it.

“I said I was sorry, Harry.” When her glare didn’t waver, John continued. “It’s not like you’ve never lost anything.”

Harry’s face somehow managed to get even redder. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“No, you can say it. I know you’re bursting to.”

“You lose things all the time, Harry, so you shouldn’t be so critical when I—”

“This is about Clara, isn’t? I’ve lost my marriage, that’s what you mean, so how dare I criticize you for losing a phone? Or maybe it’s about losing my job at the old accounting firm, or my passport that one time in Greece, or, I don’t know, even losing that bloody stupid stuffed rabbit. Because what I do, according to you, is lose things.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Sure you did,” Harry said. She flounced away from him, opening her fridge and taking out the ice tray.

God.

“Well, you always manage to keep track of the vodka,” John muttered under his breath.

Harry spun around, glaring at him. “I was getting myself a coke.”

“Sure you were,” John said, sarcastically echoing her earlier remark.

The evening had degenerated from there, and when John had told Harry the next day that he thought it would be better for both of them if he got a place of his own, her only response had been a curt little nod.

**

His Lost Thing had to be the phone, John decided. It fit all the criteria: lost recently, an item with emotional significance.

He went at the piles with a will, sorting through them meticulously so as not to miss anything.

At first John’s attention was so focused on finding his Lost Thing—there were plenty of phones scattered among the debris, but so far nothing with _Clara xxx_ written on the back—that he didn’t notice anything else. But as his excitement at starting the search wore off, John slowly began to realize that he was not alone in the house.

Other figures moved through the rooms, mostly children and teens, but a number of adults as well, the later often wearing expressions close to panic as they sorted through the piles.

John had been going at it for about an hour, he guessed, when a girl in her late teens burst into the house, her short hair dyed a brilliant pink at the ends, and her ears filed with a sparkly cluster of painful-looking piercings. “It’s my iPhone,” she said breathlessly to John, “I know that’s what I’ve lost.”

Before he could reply, she had bounded away into another room.

John stared after her, wondering why he was surprised by her comment—he’d never heard a reason why people in the Dream couldn’t speak to each other, after all—then turned back to the hallway when he heard someone sobbing, loudly.

It was a little girl, maybe five or six, although John wasn’t good at guessing children’s ages. She had dark brown hair that fell down her back in two long plaits and was wearing pink pajamas. Her face was wet with tears, and she had her thumb in her mouth.

John knelt down beside her.

It told a while for him to get her to calm down.

“He’s not a nice man,” the girl said finally, after John had asked her several times why she was so upset.

She must mean the Collector.

John personally agreed with her, but he could tell that saying this would be rather less than helpful. “Well,” he began instead, “he’s on the other side of the door, so you don’t have to think about him right now.”

The girl nodded, acknowledging this. She took her thumb from her month and clasped her hands together in a determined way that made John think she’d recently stopped sucking her thumb and had only returned to the habit because she was so scared.

“He told you about the rules, right?”

When the girl didn’t respond, John continued, “You know about not looking out the windows? About how you’re supposed to find something that you’ve lost?”

The girl nodded again. In a soft voice, almost a whisper: “Yes.”

John heard a thump, distant, like the sound of a bird throwing itself against a glass pane. He couldn’t stop himself from glancing up at the floor-length windows, his eyes catching that same featureless blur of green before he brought his attention back to the girl, who hadn’t reacted to the sound.

“Okay,” John said. “Good. So now we’ve just got to figure out what you’ve lost.”

It didn’t take long. The girl had lost “Blankie”—a piece of fabric which John supposed was part of a baby blanket, a comfort object like Harry’s rabbit—a couple of days before on a walk with her mum to the park.

“It’s easy, then,” John said. “You just have to find it.”

The little girl nodded. She hadn’t brought her thumb back to her mouth for a while, and she seemed much calmer.

“Okay,” she said.

And before John could say anything more, she was off, vanishing into one of the rooms to look for her lost blanket.

John watched her go, trying to not to feel worried. Kids almost always Came Back.

“She’s right, you know,” said a low, velvety voice behind him.

John turned around.

The voice’s owner was a tall, thin man, dressed in pajama bottoms, a white shirt and a purple dressing gown. He had a shock of messy dark hair that contrasted sharply with the pallor of his skin. “The Collector’s not a nice man.”

The intensity with which this stranger stared at John gave his lean features an almost predatory mien, and John took an involuntary step back.

“So,” the man said before John could take another. “Phone or wallet?”

“What?”

The man sighed, impatient. “Phone or wallet? You’ve lost one of them in the last week. Which is it?” The words tumbled one after another out of his mouth at a fast clip, and if he hadn’t enunciated each one so clearly, John wouldn’t have been able to understand what he was saying.

“How did you know what I’d lost?”

“The top most common Lost Things of men who have the Dream between the ages of thirty to fifty are—in decreasing order of frequency—wallet, keys, phone, and wedding ring.” The man was once again speaking incredibly quickly. “So, let’s eliminate the impossible. Keys. You have a street address written on your right hand in blue ink. It’s a building that houses those depressingly efficient rooms you can rent by the week. Obviously you wrote it to remind yourself of the address, which means you’ve recently moved in. Unlikely that you’ve lost your keys to the room already; people are careful with keys when they’ve just moved into a place, and besides, they wouldn’t let you into the room if you hadn’t, and judging by the state of your person, you were sleeping on a bed before you came here, so you haven’t been locked out.”

“I could have lost my car keys,” John interrupted.

“Unlikely. You’re renting a bedsit. You don’t even own a car, let alone could afford to maintain one in London. So, keys are out. Next, wedding ring. Your nightshirt is a clear indication that you’re not married. A partner—”

“What’s wrong with my nightshirt?” John asked, indigent. They had given John the shirt in hospital, and John admitted it was a bit cheap and hadn’t really stood up well to a few cycles through Harry’s laundry machine. But still: The stranger was wearing a purple dressing gown. Who was he to judge?

The stranger peered at shirt’s frayed sleeves, then moved his gaze up to a small hole at the shirt’s neck, letting the silence hang in the air for a moment before he continued as though John hadn’t spoken. “—A partner would scarcely let you come to bed dressed like that. Besides, your hands are tanned, but there’s no tan line from wearing a wedding ring. If you’ve been married, you would have been wearing the ring right up until the moment you’ve lost it. So, wedding ring is out as well. Which leaves us with: phone or wallet. Which is it?”

“Phone,” John responded, then added before he could stop himself, “That’s fantastic. How did you learn how to do that?”

The man shrugged as if it was nothing, but he couldn’t hide the flush of pleasure that reddened his pale cheeks.

Thump! The walls rang with a thud, louder than the one John had heard before. With an effort, he stopped himself from looking out the windows to see what the noise was.

“It’s just a bird,” John said.

“Maybe,” the stranger said.

John told himself that he didn’t care whatever was outside the windows. Changing the subject, he said, “How do you know that the Collector’s not nice?”

The man stared at John for a long moment without speaking. His cheekbones really were astonishing. No, his whole existence was astonishing. John had never met anyone remotely like him.

“Have you ever wondered why they tell you not to look out the windows?” he asked finally.

John shock his head, but the question jogged his curiosity, and he couldn’t stop himself from turning his head and turning to look through the window for moment, just to see if he could figure out what had made the thumping sound.

When he glanced back, the stranger was gone.

John glanced about for any signs of where he might have gone, but couldn’t see anything.

The stranger appeared to have vanished just as silently as he had arrived.

John sighed.

The whole encounter had been so odd that the man might as well as been an apparition. John signed, shrugged his shoulders, and returned to his searching.

**

John didn’t have a watch, so he couldn’t judge the time exactly, but it felt like several hours later, and he still haven’t found his Lost Thing.

He was beginning to get hungry as well—John hadn’t thought you could get hungry in the Dream, but his stomach complained nonetheless—and he was reminded of the story about the kid whose Lost Thing had been a sandwich. So far, the closest thing John had found to food was a jar of ancient-looking peach preserves, with grey flecks of rot dotting the orange fruit.   

He’d seen probably every type of phone that had ever been made at this point, from clunky old 1980s models that looked like blocks of cement, to copies of the flip phone he’d had in the early 2000s, to slick black iPhones, but no phone with _Clara xxx_ written on the back.

He had gone through all the rooms slowly, even braving a narrow staircase at the back of the hallway that spiraled upward into darkness, brushing cobwebs from his face as he climbed. But he when he reached the top, John found himself somehow back at the bottom of the stairs again, his head spinning.

Shaking his head, John thought he might as well give the contents of the hallway another run through, just to make sure that he hadn’t missed Harry’s phone, when he realized that he didn’t recognize anything in the piles.

 Somehow the items had changed while he’d been going through the house. The deer with the rifle was gone, and in its place was a pile of unframed canvases with badly painted pictures of clowns standing in front of waterfalls, a skateboard, and a rocking horse with one plastic eye missing.

The items in the house, it seemed, were not constant.

John went through the rest of the rooms to confirm this, and quickly discovered that he was right: the entire contents of the house had shifted.

He planted himself in a dusty maroon armchair, surrounded by a sea of ancient broken records, and cassette tapes. John put his head in his hands, starting, for the first time since he’d arrived in the Dream, to feel frightened.

The sound of a sob, slow and full of pain, brought him out of this.

John looked up. The little girl with the plaits stood in the hallway. She had a scarp of blue fabric in one hand that must be the blanket she had lost, but her narrow shoulders shook with her crying, and her thumb was back in her mouth.

Relief flooded John’s body. He’d been trying not to think about the little girl all morning—kids almost always Came Back—but she’d been at the back of his mind just the same, the idea that she might be the exception to the rule worrying at him like a sore tooth.

He stood up, and went to her, kneeling so that his eyes were level with her face. “What’s wrong, sweetie?” he asked. “You found your blanket, didn’t you?” John pointed at the piece of cloth. “That’s it, right?”

The girl nodded but didn’t stop crying.

“What’s wrong?” John asked again, as gently as he could manage.

“I don’t want to go to the man at the door,” the girl whispered, her voice so quiet that John could barely hear her. “He said that I’m not allowed to guess and that if I gave him the wrong thing then...”

The rest of whatever she had to say was undecipherable as she dissolved into tears once again—it sounded like she said something like _eat me_ and _eyes_ , which couldn’t be right—so John held her for a while as she cried. He remembered how when he was in school, some of the other children whispered tales that turned the Collector into some sort of bogyman, and now he thought for the first time that maybe it was better to have the Dream come for him when he was old enough not to believe these childish fables.   

When her tears finally subsided, John said, “But you recognize your blanket. You know that’s the thing you lost, right?”

The girl clutched the blanket tightly to herself and nodded.

“So you’re not guessing, then,” John said.

The girl nodded again, but her eyes were still wet, and she didn’t seem very convinced.

John thought about it. “Would you feel better if I come to the door with you when you give your Lost Thing to the Collector? I won’t let him be mean to you.”

“Maybe.”

John stood up. “Come on. It’ll only take a moment, and then you’ll be back home, and your mum and dad will so be proud of you, and you can tell everyone at school that you’ve had the Dream.”

The little girl seemed to like this idea, which was good, because John didn’t have any others for getting her out of the house. He took her hand, and led her to the door, partially pleased that she seemed to have calmed down and partially glad for a more selfish reason: Now he’d have another chance to get a good look at the forest.

They stood at the door, its dark wood silent and imposing. John turned the nob, and the door swung open.

The girl pressed her slim body against John, trembling.

John squeezed her hand, and led her out on to the doorstep.

John blinked in the sudden light.

His guess that he had been searching for hours was right, judging by the sun, which bathed the forest in the vigorous golden rays of high noon.

John stared out into the trees, trying to see if he could catch a glimpse of whatever had made those thumping sounds against the window, but now that he was outside, he couldn’t tell why he had thought the forest looked strange. It was just tall trees, and grass. A cluster of white flowers growing where the trees parted to let a trickle of sunlight down to the forest floor. Nothing more.

The Collector stood slightly to the right of the door, his arms folded across his chest. “Done already, John?”

Without waiting for an answer, he turned to the little girl. “What about you, Kirsty? Are you sure that’s really your Lost Thing? You know what I said would happen if you make the wrong choice.”

The Collector's tie pin, John noticed as he stared at him, was cast in the shape of a snarling wolf.

The girl trembled. If John hadn’t been holding on to her hand, she probably would have run back into the house.

“Stop frightening her,” John told the Collector. “It’s not helping.”

“But it’s the truth.” The Collector smiled at him, his tone cheery, innocent. “How can the truth be unhelpful?”

“Childish fairy tales aren’t the truth,” John said.

“Children,” the Collector said, unfolding his arms to clasp his hands sagely together, “have the most marvelous way of seeing straight to the heart of things.

“And let me tell you a secret, John,” he continued, stepping closer to them so that John could taste his breath on his check. The Collector’s earlier pleasant manner had vanished completely now, and his words rang low and rich with menace.  “Dreams are the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this Dream is simple enough: the monsters exist.”  

He stepped back, his demeanor officious and harmless once again.

“So,” the Collector said. “You have Lost Things for me?” His every inch said: I’m just someone performing a job. Sure, these formalities are bothersome, but rules are rules.

The Collector was speaking to both of them.

 John fidgeted, uncomfortable under the weight of the Collector’s attention, and realized that with the hand that wasn’t holding the girl’s, he’d been feeling the item in his pocket.

John had found the watch about an hour into searching. It was old-fashioned, the type you have to wind up by hand, and made of gold, once shiny but now scratched and worn with age. The initials _H.W._ were engraved on the back. It had reminded John of a watch he’d seem his paternal grandfather, Henry, wear but which no one had been able to find in his things after he had died. John didn’t think that his Lost Thing could be something he’d never owned in the first place—Grandpa had left the watch to Harry, who was named after him—but he’d picked up it anyway.

John felt a wild impulse to hand the watch to the Collector, just to see what really happened to the people who gave him the wrong thing.

Then the girl—Kirsty—trembled against him again, on the verge of tears once more, and John remembered why he had come to the door.

“I don’t have anything,” he told the Collector. “But Kirsty does.”

To Kristy: “Go on, give him your blanket.”

She hesitated.

“If you’re here outside when she gives it me,” the Collector said, his voice the bored monotone of someone explaining a simple procedure for the thousandth time, “any item you have in your possession is your submission for your Lost Thing.”

John glared at him, then let go of Kirsty’s hand, and smiled at her, trying to look comforting. “Listen,” he said. “I have to go back inside now, but you’re going to be fine. All you have to do is give him your blanket so that he makes sure it’s the right thing, and then you can go home.”

“What if it’s not right?” Kirsty said.

“It is right. You know it is. Don’t let him bother you. It’s just going to take a quick look at it, and then you’ll be home before you know it, okay?”

“Okay,” the girl echoed, still sniffing.

“Okay,” John repeated. “You’re going to be fine.”

He gave her one more quick hug, and then went back into the house.

Once he was inside, he leaned against the closed door, breathing heavily. “Bastard,” he muttered under his breath.

“I told you the girl was right. The Collector’s not a nice man.”

John turned around quickly, startled.

The stranger was back.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Collector's quote about dreams is adapted from Stephen King's It.


	3. Chapter 3

The stranger stood behind the rocking horse, his eerie pale eyes fixed on John’s face.

“You were listening in on during my whole conversation with the girl this morning,” John said.

“Clearly,” the man relied, not a bit put out at John’s claim that he’d been eavesdropping.

He moved toward John, stepping right over the pile of junk in the center of the hallway rather than walking around it. “You’re confused,” the man said.

John frowned at him.

“Oh, don’t be upset.” The stranger waved his hand dismissively, as if he could push John’s feelings away with a gesture. “People like you always are.”

 _Why was everyone in the Dream telling him this?_ “What do you mean,” John said coldly, “people like me?”

“Stupid people,” the man said. Then, off John’s murderous look, “Oh, don’t be angry. Practically everyone is.”

John couldn’t contain his fury any longer. “Of course I’m confused!” he shouted. “Anyone would be! Rooms full of people’s lost trinkets that change their contents every time you walk out of them, windows you can’t look out of, a madman guarding the front door! This house is completely impossible—it’s the textbook example of confusion.”

The man watched John’s outburst with equanimity. “We are here, in the house. Therefore it is not impossible.”

“There are stairs that go to nowhere! Of course it’s bloody impossible.”

“Wrong,” the man relied. “Unlikely, perhaps, but not impossible. The stairs are nothing. Haven’t you ever been to Alaska?”

John could see that his companion would not be moved on this subject (what did Alaska have to do with anything?) and his obstinacy should have infuriated him further, but oddly enough, he felt himself calming down as though the other man’s implacability revealed the absurdity of their situation.

Realizing that further debate on this would be useless, John said, “Who told you about the Collector not being nice?”

“My arch-enemy,” the man said.

John laughed. Was there no end to his man’s oddness? “People don’t have arch-enemies.”

The stranger raised his eyebrows. “They don’t? How dull.”

“Does this other person think of himself as your arch-enemy?”

The man thought about it for a moment. “I believe he’d call himself my brother.”

Well, maybe the man wasn’t so strange after all. John recalled a couple of the fights he’d had with Harry in the last week, and decided that arch-enemy wouldn’t be a completely inaccurate description. “How does your brother know anything about the Collector?”

“Mycroft—“ the man began.

“Mycroft?”

“My brother,” the man said. He paused. “Obviously,” he continued, giving John a _would you please shut up now_ look that was (no great shock) completely at home on his features.

John couldn’t stop himself from smirking. _Mycroft?_

“You find this amusing?”

“No,” John said, removing the smile from his face. “Go on.”

But now the stranger was smiling, too. “Mother chose it because she thought it was unique. I find the name to be both pompous and turgid, hardly a sobriquet that flows off the tongue with ease. It suits him.”

John wanted to ask, _What’s your name?_ but this didn’t seem appropriate at this point in their relationship, sort of like when you can’t remember a one night stand’s name the morning after and it’s less awkward to tiptoe around the subject until the person leaves your flat than to ask.

“Mycroft,” the man began again, “had the Dream when he was fourteen. He decided that he was tired of waiting, and so he purposefully forgot his umbrella at school. He had the Dream that night.”

“That’s not how the Dream works. You can’t—”

“You don’t know my brother.”

“But everyone knows that you can’t make the Dream come by losing something on purpose.”

“Mycroft had the Dream the next day,” the man repeated, talking over John. “And when I asked him about it, all that he would say is that it took him less than five minutes to find his umbrella, that the whole process was incredibly tedious, that it only reinforced the completely unnatural and unnecessary sentimental attachments that people form with inanimate objects, and that the Collector was not a very nice man.”

“Your brother told you this when he was fourteen?”

“As I said, you don’t know my brother. Although he’s kept that umbrella by his side ever since the Dream, so there’s your unnatural attachment right there.”

“Finding your Lost Thing in five minutes, that’s incredible.”

“That’s nothing,” the man snapped. “I found mine in three.”

So: a bit of sibling rivalry, then. The stranger was looking more human by the minute. “If you’ve already found your Lost Thing, then why are you still here?” John asked.

“I asked you before,” the man said, “why we aren’t allowed to look at the windows, and you didn’t answer me.”

John shrugged. “It’s the rules. Everyone knows that.”

The man narrowed his eyes. “Everyone knows the rules, but no one knows _why._ Anyone with half a brain cell can find something he’s lost, but it takes real skill to determine why we have to find it in the first place. Why do we only get one day to find the item? Why do some people get the Dream when they are young and others wait years for it to come? Why can’t we look out the windows?”

The questions came rapid fire, one after another in the man’s deep baritone.

“So you going to solve the mystery of the windows,” John said.

“I have seven theories,” the man said.

“Only seven?” John said sarcastically, a bit put out at the man’s claim that “anyone with half a brain cell” could find his Lost Thing when here John was, still looking.

“I can’t perform some of my tests until the sun goes down,” the man said, frowning as if John’s insult was serious.

“You can’t be here after sunset! No one Comes Back from the Dream after the sun goes down.”

“Yet,” the stranger corrected him. “Not one has Come Back after sundown yet.”

John had no response to this.

“Come with me,” the man said, gesturing toward one of the rooms. “You haven’t found your phone. Let’s look for it.”

John followed him into the room.

“Why are you helping me?” John asked, opening a chest that had been painted with purple polka dots and glancing at a letter inside one of the drawers that read in its entirety _Amanda says no_ in large, childish handwriting before tossing it to the ground.

The stranger shrugged. “I’m bored. This is more interesting than sitting around waiting for the sun to set.”

John described his lost phone, and they began looking, sorting through the endless pipes of junk. As they worked, the stranger told John about all the other facts about him that he was able to deduce from his appearance.

The things that the stranger could tell about John just from looking at him was apparently endless, encompassing his being an army doctor invalided home from Afghanistan to his fighting with Harry and deciding to move to London on his own.

When the man started getting the real reasons Harry had been so angry at John—it went far deeper than her drinking, apparently—John became tired of the man’s all-seeing scrutiny and started asking him about the other people who were wandering through the house looking for their own Lost Things in an attempt to shake his interest.

As a diversion, it worked marvelously.

Although the stranger acted as though the intimate facts he could discern from people’s outward appearances were blindly clear, he nonetheless clearly appreciated the chance to show off. Soon John was laughing at the odd details the man offered up, which caused his companion to laugh as well and made the people wandering through the rooms shoot the pair of them disapproving glances, as though merriment wasn’t appropriate in the Dream.

“What about that chap?” John asked, pointing to a man in his late twenties who was clad in trousers and a dress shirt that he must have fallen asleep in. A bruise discolored his left cheek, and his hands shook as he sorted through a tangle of necklaces and rings that lay in an untidy heap on a dark brown coffee table.

“You mean the underemployed stockbroker who’s addicted to online porn?” the stranger answered. “He’s getting nervous because it’s less than an hour to sunset and he still hasn’t found his Lost Thing. He thinks his Long Thing is his wedding ring because it’s not on his finger, but he forgot that he took off it last night because it makes him uncomfortable to wear it while he’s masturbating to women who aren’t his wife. He’ll figure it out in about ten minutes. Even odds if he finds it before time’s up.”

Less than an hour before sunset. John forced himself not to look at the windows—the time was what it was; checking the light wouldn’t help. 

 “He doesn’t look like a porn addict,” John said.

“Did you not see his right shirt sleeve?” the stranger asked. “Three hours a day, every day, sitting in front of the computer looking at pornography: he’s an addict.”

John didn’t see anything unusual about the man’s sleeve.

“He has a fetish for women with dyed hair,” the stranger continued. “His favorite is a site called ManicPixiePornGirls.com. He was using it when he fell asleep last night.”

The stranger’s deadpan delivery of this information—the name “ManicPixiePornGirl.com” included—made John smile with amusement.

“You can’t possibly tell that all from his sleeve,” John said, fighting the impulse to laugh.

“He arrived at about the same time I did this morning. He saw a young woman with pink hair in the hallway and told her that she looked just one of the women who feature in the aforementioned site, opined that ‘what happens in the Dream stays in the Dream’ and asked if she fancied a shag.”

John started to laugh.

“And that’s not cheating!” the man interjected. “That’s listening. That’s being observant and—”

“I’m not laughing at you,” John said. “It’s just…’What happens in the Dream stays in the Dream?’ I’ve heard some bad pick-up lives in my time—used some bad pick-up lines for that matter—but that one really just…” He trailed off, dissolving into laughter once again.

The stranger joined him, and the object of their amusement stopped searching through the rings to stare at them, his expression puzzled and irate.

“That’s how he got that mark on his cheek,” John realized. “He was slapped.”

“Yes,” the stranger said. “Well done. Very observant.”

This set the pair of them into laughter once again, until the man who John decided he’d call the stockbroker internet porn addict (who had a thing for girls with pink hair and wasn’t afraid to let them know it, as long as it stayed in the Dream) left the room in disgust.

The stranger fell silent the moment they were alone.

He turned to John, his manner was suddenly serious, as if someone had flipped a switch that burned any trace of humor out of him. “Your phone isn’t your Lost Thing,” he said.

“Yes it is. I told you how I lost it. You figured out that it was my Lost Thing yourself.”

The stranger shook his head. “No. I was wrong. You may have lost it, but it’s not your Lost Thing. If it was, we would have found it by now.”

John turned away from the stranger, and John’s gaze fell on the window as if drawn there by a magnetic pull.

The last rays of sunlight had cast the room in a golden, honeyed light. But behind the glass it was different: Outside the house, the lengthening shadows had cast the forest into darkness, the individual trees blurring into on another, their individual branches and trunks indistinguishable. The muted dark tones of the late afternoon made the forest look sterile and stark, like the tangled machinery that had stood guard over John’s bed in the hospital.

John shuddered. His skin itched, like there was something moving underneath the skin. Worms, he thought randomly, crawling through the dirt.

It took effort to draw his attention away from the windows.  

 “It’s Harry’s phone,” John said. “It has to be.”

But ever since he made his first round searching through the rooms without finding the phone, John had had the sneaking suspicion that the stranger was right.

The  stranger’s eyes—where they grey? Blue? John couldn’t tell—seemed to pierce right through this lie. John wanted to look away, but he need that if he did he’d find himself looking out the window again, so he forced himself to meet the stranger stare for stare.

“If it was, you would have found it by now. The Collector’s not unfair.”

 “I’ve tried and tried,” John said, “but I can’t think of anything else that I’ve lost.”

“No favorite childhood toys gone missing? Love letters lost? Angry ex ever throw your things in the bin after a break-up?”

John shook his head no at his each of the suggestions. “I’m sure that I’ve lost things over the years—who hasn’t?—but there’s nothing I remember in particular. And it could be anything! Some toy I lost when I was six, and forgot all about, and now I’m supposed to somehow find it. I told you before: this is insane. It’s impossible. The sun’s almost down.”

The stranger stepped closer to John. “No,” he said so resolutely that John couldn’t help but feel his heart lift. “Not impossible. I told you: any idiot can find what he’s lost.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

The stranger sighed. “Now isn’t the time for your ego.”

“My ego! You’re—”

“Stop talking. Listen to me.” The stranger’s voice was so imperious (the type of voice that sees disobedience as outside the realm of possibility) that John had closed his mind almost before he realized what he was doing.

The stranger bent down, so that his face was level with John’s, and took John’s hands into his own.

John startled, his heart racing. John realized that this entire time he’d been half-holding on to the notion that his odd companion was some sort of ghost or apparition, and the feeling the stranger’s hand in his own, of knowing that he was inconvertibly real was unexpected but not unwelcome.

“Close your eyes,” the stranger told him.

And to think, a moment ago John would said there was no way the situation could get any weirder.  “How is that going to help?”

“Just do what I say. We don’t have time for your asinine questions.”

John took a deep breath. The air around him had taken on a heavy, murky quality, and he could swear that the room was getting hotter even as the sunlight slipped away.

He closed his eyes. Without the visual to the distract him, he could feel the other man’s palms against his own, the coolness of his skin, the rapid beating of his heart.

“Tell me what you took with you when you left Afghanistan.”

John tried to remember.

“What happened when you left the hospital?” the stranger prompted.

“I was discharged on a Sunday,” John started, speaking slowly as he tried to picture it. “They arranged a last consult with my therapist, and we talked about how it might be difficult to reintegrate to civilian life, so he suggested—”

“Yes, yes.” John couldn’t see him, but he knew the stranger well enough by now to imagine the impatience that was surely written across his features. “Skipping straight to the items you took back with you to England.”

“They gave me two changes of clothing. The nightshirt I’m wearing now, actually, that you don’t think someone married would wear. Um. I had some books, a camera. I bought those back. Letters that Harry had sent to me.”

“All right. You flew home. Moved in with your sister. Then what?”

John opened his eyes. “This is stupid. We’re almost out of time. I don’t—”

“Shut your eyes! Studies show that people are fifty-three percent more likely to accurately recall past events if they aren’t distracted by visual stimuli. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you’ve been staring out the windows.”

John gulped. He closed his eyes again.

“Continue,” the stranger said dryly.

“Okay. So, I, um, moved in with Harry. Kipped on her conch. I went shopping with her a couple of times, since I barely had any clothes. There was, um…while was staying with Harry I visited an old mate from the army, and bought a gun. I’d got used to having one in the army, just for protection—”

“It’s not relevant that you currently possess an illegal handgun unless you’ve recently lost it. Did you?” The man’s tone was chipped, his words crisp and precise, betraying no hint of any anxiety—if he was feeling anxiety—as the time until sunset rapidly ran out.

John pictured the gun, nestled snuggly in a drawer in his room back in London where he’d placed in after Harry had left the room.

“No.”

“Moving on, then.”

“Right. You know the rest. I stayed with Harry for a couple of weeks. Didn’t lose anything, just bought new things. Clothes. A laptop. She gave me her phone, said it would help us stay in touch. I lost it. We got in a big fight, and I moved out.”

The stranger dropped John’s hands, and John opened his eyes.

His companion rubbed his hands together excitedly, the most animated that John had seen him thus far. “That’s it! Moving! Of course; I should have thought of that as soon as I realized you’ve just arrived in London. Moving’s the second most common time people lose things. You must have lost your Lost Thing last night during the move.”

The stranger trained his laser-like gaze on John, the completeness of his attention resembling a cat watching his cornered prey. “Tell me everything you did yesterday.”

John took a step back, as if this would decrease the weight of the stranger’s scrutiny, then, when it didn’t, forced himself to meet the stranger’s gaze.

The one good thing about having those cold pale eyes fixed on him: it shut the rest of the world out, made it seem like the house and the forest and the rest of it had fallen away so that the Dream consisted only of the two of them. Staring into his companion’s pale eyes, the dark draw of the forest had vanished, and John wasn’t even tempted to look out the windows. 

John thought about it. “I got up. Had cereal for breakfast. Harry was running behind schedule, so I read the paper for a bit while I waited for her to get ready. Is this really important? I don’t--”

“Keep going. Leave nothing out.”

“I looked up the address again to remember it—wrote it on my hand to help, but you saw that already—and planned out the route to London. We took Harry’s car, but I drove, because the traffic in the city makes her nervous. We got to the building, and I paid the resident management a week’s rent. We started bringing my things up to the room. I didn’t have a lot, so it should have been quick, but it seemed to take forever. Harry had to carry almost everything up because I…”

John broke off.

He recalled the annoying noise his crutch had made as he limped to Harry’s car, how useless had he felt leaning on it while he watched Harry struggling to carry his things. He’d been carrying that wretched crutch with him for weeks now, its ceaseless clacking along the ground beating an unwanted echo to his footsteps. When he woke up, it was always propped up against the foot of his bed, the first thing that he reached for, and the last thing he did before bed was make sure it would be waiting for him in the morning.

It should have been here with him, in the Dream, just like his nightshirt and pajama bottoms, but instead he’d arrived without it. Even more than that: he’d arrived in the Dream walking naturally and easily without even the hint of a limp, and hadn’t questioned it, the way that you sometimes fly in dreams and never wonder how you do it until you wake up.

“What is it?” the stranger asked.

“I had a crutch. They gave it to me in hospital in Afghanistan and I brought it back to England when I felt.”

“You got shot in the shoulder.”

“It’s, um, my therapist says it’s psychosomatic, from the stress of the shoulder injury, but—”

The stranger laughed. “I should have known. You’ve got a therapist; of course you have a psychosomatic injury. When did you lose it?”

That last trip up in the elevator, when the tension had been so thick between him and his sister: John had leaned the crutch against the wall as he bent down to rub at his knee during the silent ride. Could he have left the crutch there in the elevator? He tried to remember if he’d had the crutch in his room when he went to sleep and couldn’t. He hadn’t moved around much after Harry had left—and the limp wasn’t as bad when he’d was distracted, as he had been that night with his anger at Harry—so maybe it had been missing and he hadn’t even noticed.

“I think I left it in the elevator last night when Harry and I rode up for the last time with my things,” John said slowly. “I’m not sure, but I--”

 “—haven’t got any other option at this point,” the stranger finished for him. His brisk manner belied his ominous words. “What does it look like?”

John described the crutch to him, and they both attacked the piles with a will, conscious of the last light of the day casting the Lost Things around them into increasingly long shadows.

It was John who found it. The crutch was almost completely hidden from view, just the end sticking out from where it was buried under a pile of teen magazines with boys bands grinning up on the covers.  John never would have recognized it if the stranger hadn’t helped him figure out that he had lost it at all.

But as soon as he pulled it out, John knew that he had the right object. The metal was scratched where John thrown it onto the concrete in frustration during a particularly frustrating trip to the shopping centre, and the shape of it under his arm was immediately familiar.

“I’ve got it,” John told the stranger.

The stranger walked over from where he’d been looking through a carton filled with novelty mugs and inflated beach balls to examine the crutch with interest. “The sun’s almost set. You should go now.”

As if to emphasize this, another crash reverberated through the house. Far too loud to pretend it was a bird now.

John resolutely avoided the windows, fixing his attention on the stranger instead—but no, he couldn’t call him the stranger any longer, could he, not after the man had saved him—John turned back to his friend, then, who was staring back at him, motionless, his pale skin and dark hair looking ghostly and unreal in the growing shadows of approaching twilight.

“You should come with me,” John said.

“I told you—”

“About your experiment about the windows, yes, I know. But you should come with me anyway. No one Comes Back after sunset.”

“I told you: I’ll be the first. Try to listen next time, I detest repeating myself.”

Like there'd be a next time if he stayed in the Dream at night. Although, if anyone could Come Back after sunset, John was beginning to think that his friend could.

But the man finally seemed nervous; he was pacing back and forth with a pent-up, nervous energy that matched the pressure in the air, the nauseating feeling of anticipation, like something was hovering outside of the house, waiting.

“What if you don’t Come Back?” John asked. “Don’t you have friends, a family? Someone back at home who cares about you?” As he tried to think of what else might entice the man to leave the Dream, John realized that, in-depth deductions about his background notwithstanding, he really knew very little about his new friend.

“What about your brother?” he said finally, grasping at straws. “Won’t he be upset if you don’t return?”

“Mycroft? Don’t be stupid. He would regard such sentiment as irrational and useless.”

John risked a glance at the window. The sun hovered at the horizon now, red and angry, and sinking fast. If he stayed here arguing much longer, neither of them would Come Back.

“You can’t stay here and risk your life just to prove you’re clever enough to find out why we can’t look out the windows.”

“Why not?”

“You just can’t! It’s insane.”

The stranger—it was hard to think of him as a friend when he wore such a cold, calculating expression—stopped his pacing to walk over to the windows and stare defiantly outward. “I can and I will. You people are like lemmings.” Still looking out onto the forest, he said in a high, mocking tone, “Find your Lost Thing; don’t make incorrect guesses; don’t look out the windows. Dull, dull, dull. People spend their whole lives following these silly little rules—go to university, get married, pay down a mortgage, go to work. What’s the point? Who cares about Coming Back if it’s just to returning to more of the same dull, mindless plodding?”

“Some people would call that life,” John muttered. The room was becoming increasingly tense as the man stared out the window, until John could swear he almost feel the air crackle with electricity.

“Well, I don’t,” the man said with his back still turned toward John.

Fine. That was it. The man was mad; the sun was almost down; John couldn’t be responsible for what happened to him.

As John turned to leave, he felt the weight of the watch he’d stuck in his pocket bump against his leg. John stopped, remembering how the Collector had told him that he’d consider the watch John’s proffered Lost Thing if John had the watch with him when the little girl presented her lost blanket.

John paused, talking the watch out of his pocket. As he set it firmly down on top of an old IBM computer—he didn’t want any confusion about what item he was presenting as his Lost Thing—an idea came to him.

“What is your Lost Thing?” he asked his friend.

When the man didn’t respond, John asked the question again, twice, speaking louder until the man finally turned from the window, his eyes faraway.

“Why do you care?”

John tried to think of a reason that might make sense to his friend. “I’m curious about it. You know what mine is. If you don’t tell me, I’ll Come Back, and wonder about it forever.”

“I’m not going to present it to the Collector,” the man said. “If this is some sort of trick to get me to Come Back before sunset, it’s an incredibly clumsy one.”

“How could it possibly be a trick?” John tried to keep his face as innocent as possible and to not say anything that was technically a lie. “I can’t physically force you to put whatever it is into the Collector’s hand.”

John’s friend considered this. “Follow me,” he said, and strode off in the direction of the hallway.

John did so, leaning on his crutch for support—now that he was aware of it, his limp was back in full force—to the end of the hallway, where the man came to a stop at the bottom of the spiraling staircase that led to nowhere.

His friend knelt, his purple dressing gown pooling around him, and reached down under the bottom stair. “I don’t even know if it will be here any longer. I realized the items in the rooms change when you leave them, so I put this here for safekeeping on the theory that the staircase contents remain constant, but I didn’t have data to back that up so I’m not…wait, here we are.”

Standing up, the man held his Lost Thing up theatrically in one hand.

“A skull?” John asked, incredulous. “Your Lost Thing is a skull? Another arch-enemy of yours?”

“I’ve been having some difficulty with my landlord,” the man said, ignoring John’s question about the skull’s provenance. “He threw it out along with the rest of my experiments last Tuesday.”

John had about a million questions he wanted to ask—Whose skull was it? What did his friend mean, experiments?—but there was no time for that now.

“All right,” John said, and grabbed his friend will his free arm, and started marching him toward the door.

The man struggled against him, trying to break free, but John was stronger than he looked. His stay in hospital hadn’t stolen all of the conditioning he’d gained in the army, and although his friend might be taller, John was more solidly built, and filled with a furious determination to get his friend out that door at whatever cost besides.

“Stop this at once! Stop it!” the man ordered as John dragged him to the house front door, and stopped, breathing heavily. “Have you gone mad? What are you doing?”

John let go of his companion’s arm, put down his crutch against the wall, and opened the door.

Outside, the sun was a sliver of red above the horizon, and smattering of early stars were already scattered across the sky.

 “Saving your life, of course,” John said with satisfaction. “I should think that would be obvious.”

And then, before his friend had time for anything more than an outraged look, John pushed them through the doorway, picked his crutch, and exited the house, closing the door quickly behind him.

The two of them locked eyes, John’s friend’s brow furrowed in anger. But before either could speak:

“Cutting it a bit close, aren’t we, John?”

The Collector was standing in front of them with his back to the forest, sneering in that haughty manner that John disliked so much. Behind him, the trees were shrouded in darkness, and even though they were outside, the forest retained the unsettlingly, otherworldly menace it had when John had glimpsed it through the house’s windows. A sense of wrongness pervaded the entire landscape, although John couldn’t have said precisely what was out of the ordinary.  

“Oh, and you brought a friend,” the Collector added, inspecting John’s companion with some interest. “Pity. I’m not sure if we’ll have time for two.”

“The sun hasn’t set yet,” John said shortly.

Ignoring this, the Collector said to John’s friend, “I thought you’d accepted my challenge. You said figuring out about the windows would be easy. I didn’t think you’d give up so soon. It’s too bad.” The man put on a pout that was a grotesque mockery of sadness. “We were going to have so much fun together.”

“I’m not,” John’s friend said. “This is just some game of John’s. I’ll be going back inside to perform my experiments at once.”

“No,” the Collector said, shaking his head sadly. “No. Here you are, just like all the others, waiting for me to take your Lost Thing before sunset. You said you were different than the rest of them, but you’re not. You’re ordinary.”

Silence.

That was it, John realized. Every time he’d been in the woods at dust the air had been filled with birdsong, but here the trees were chillingly still.

“I’m not ordinary,” John’s friend said, stepping away and extending his arm to the door.

John reached and grabbed him by the arm, hard, and held on with everything he had. His entire body was racing with panic—were those eyes he saw in the forest behind them?—John limped toward the Collector and thrust his crutch at him.

“Here,” he said to the Collector, “take it. It’s my Lost Thing. I’m presenting it now.”

“Don’t be so eager, John.” The Collector’s tie pin glinted, the sliver of sun that still clung stubbornly to the horizon casting it in a blood red sheen. “It’s unseemly.”

“Take it. You have to take it. I’m giving it to you,” John said, trying to keep the desperation from his voice.  “And then, take his Lost Thing, too,” John added, indicating his companion. “You have to take it.”

Both of the other men stared at him.

“I have to?” the Collector said, snidely, at the same time as John’s friend said, “I’m not giving it to him.”

“Yes,” John said to both of them. “Yes, you do”—indicating the Collector—“even if he”—looking disapprovingly at his friend—“won’t give it to you.”

Seeing the lack of comprehension on both their faces, John told the Collector, “When I was out here before, with the little girl, you told me that you would take whatever item I had on me at the time as my Lost Thing if I was outside when the girl presented her item. So, now I’m here, giving you my crutch as my Lost Thing, so you have to accept his skull as his Lost Thing, whether he gives it to you or not. You have to accept both our items. Rules are rules, you said.”

Out of breath, John stopped, and tried not to shake as he held at his crutch to the Collector, and hoping that he sounded more confident in his argument—which he was not entirely sure was correct—than he felt.

“Rules are rules,” the Collector said finally, and John tried to keep his relief from showing on his face. He might have just (possibly) outsmarted two of the cleverest men he had ever meet, but they weren’t (literally) out of the woods yet.

The Collector turned the crutch over in his hands, examining it closely, and then sighed, apparently unable to find anything wrong with it. He gave it back to John, rubbing his hands against another as though trying to wash the feeling of the crutch off of them.

“Now, look at his Lost Thing, too,” John ordered, gesturing toward his friend.

The Collector sighed again. “Hand it over, S—”

“No,” John’s friend said.

“Don’t be tedious,” the Collector said. “The game’s over. Rules are rules.”

John’s friend handed the skull over.

The Collector turned the skull over in his hands, his long slender fingers almost caressing it. “Is that why you like John?” he asked the taller man. “Because he’s so ordinary? It must be nice to have someone to trot out the rule book for you just when you’re about to lose. And ordinary people are so good at playing by the rules. I should get one for myself, maybe.”

“Give it back to me.”

The Collector smiled, still spinning the skull in his hands, and then without warning, threw it at John’s friend. “Catch!”

The other man must have had better reflexes than a cat, because he had reached out and captured the skull in both hands almost before John had realized that the Collector had thrown it.

“So,” the Collector said, “it’s been fun, really, guys, but—”

John turned to his friend, his heart pounding. All this time trying to figure out how to Come Back, and he’d never thought about how he’d contact his friend again once he left.

“Listen,” John said quickly, “I don’t know your name; I don’t even know where you live, you have to—”

But the Collector stepped smoothly between them, cutting John off. “Now I hate to break up…whatever this is...but it’s getting late, and I think it’s well past time for both of you to go back to your beds.”

The Collector put one hand on John’s shoulder, and John couldn’t stop himself from shuddering at the overwhelming sensation of wrongness that the man’s (if he was a man) touch infused throughout his body.

“Alright, Johnny boy, time to go home.”

“Just wait one minute so that I can--” John pleaded.

“Sorry, John, time’s up,” the Collector said, cheerfully.

John tried to back away, but the Collector’s grip was immovable, the man unnaturally strong for someone so short and small.

The Collector leaned in closer until his face was uncomfortably close to John’s own. The Collector grinned. When his lips parted, John saw that the Collector’s clean white teeth had vanished, and his mouth was full of knives.

“But don’t feel bad about not saying your goodbyes,” the Collector said, and how he managed to talk through that mouthful of knives John had no idea.

“Why not?” John said, telling himself that it couldn’t be real, it couldn’t be, and gritting his own teeth to keep from screaming.

The Collector smiled at John again, and this time was his grin revealed again nothing more sinister than a mouth filled with two rows of white teeth, all of them straight and even, as if to match the Collector’s clean dark suit.  

 “Why, because I’ll be seeing you, of course,” the Collector said.

He squeezed John’s shoulder, hard, his fingernails pressing painfully into John’s skin.

And then everything went white. 


	4. Chapter 4

John woke up in London.

There was no moment when he didn’t realize where he was: John recognized the sickly yellow ceiling and uncomfortably firm bed right away.

He lay there for several long moments, his pulse still racing. The vision of those last, surreal moments—eyes watching him from the forest, his friend holding a skull, the Collector grinning up at him with a mouth of knives—flashed through his head in unnerving succession, and he trembled under the bedcovers, uncertain if what had just occurred had been the Dream or a unusually vivid nightmare.

When he sat up and saw his crutch propped up at the foot of the bed, John knew that it had been the Dream.  

John got out of bed and picked the crutch up.

The metal was hot, as though it had moved through fire during whatever process brought it along with him from the Dream back to London.

 _I’ll be seeing you_ , the Collector had said.

What did that mean? Everyone knew that the Dream only comes once.

The Collector's words repeated themselves in John's head again and again, the Collector's sing-song voice roaring in the otherwise silent room.

John decided that focusing on the Collector's senseless comment and those last, terrible moments in the Dream would be madness, so he drove the Collector's voice away, and instead paced around his room, using the crutch for support—his limp was, annoyingly, still back in full force—not sure what to do next.

There was only one small window in his room, and through it John could see the lights of the city against the dark sky. John guessed it was around six or seven: He must have spent the entire day in the Dream.

Tired of this aimless wandering, John sat down at his desk, uncertain what to do next. In a way, he’d been waiting his whole life for the Dream to come for him and now that it had, there was a feeling of let-down, of _now what?_ Kind of like when he’d had sex for the first time, and thought: this is what all the fuss is about?

Only that wasn’t quite right: Although the Dream had been unlike anything John had expected it to be, it had not been disappointing or mundane but rather odder than John could have ever imagined.

It was just that John was supposed to have someone to celebrate finding his Lost Thing with, but the only person he could think of to call was Harry, and he didn’t want to talk to her.

John thought about writing—if he didn’t have friends to tell, why not share it with the internet?—and opened his blog, his hands hovering over the keyboard.

All he could think of to type was: _I went into the Dream and a tall, handsome stranger saved my life by helping me find my Lost Thing before sunset_ , which sounded like the beginning of a bad romance novel—plus, handsome? Where had that word came from? Not like he’d had time to notice the stranger’s looks, really—so John closed the blog post without typing anything.

Where was his friend now? Had he woken up alone like John with no one to tell about the Dream? Was he here in London somewhere, or did he live in the county? Or was he even in England at all? He could live abroad for all John knew.

In fact, despite the man being able to learn basically everything about him, John really didn’t know anything about his friend, except that he was tall, favored purple dressing gowns, had a remarkable gift for making deductions, his name (probably) began with “S.”

Oh, and he liked to call John an idiot a lot.

Which was too bad, because John suddenly realized that what he wanted more than anything was to find him.

Sure, the man had devoted half of their conversations to insulting John, and he clearly thought he was superior to everyone around him, and his habit of declaring his insights in long, arrogant monologues would probably become annoying really quickly once the novelty of the man's incredible observations wore off, but that didn’t matter. There was just something about him that was so strangely likeable and charming. Maybe the way he looked when he smiled, or his unruly hair, or that the fact that, bad romance novel or not, he’d basically saved John’s life.

John still wanted to see him. More than that, he wanted to learn all about the man. What did such an amazing person do for work? Where had he grown up? Did he have siblings? When—

Oh, but that was something. John did know one hard fact about the man: He had a brother named Mycroft. An unusual name, to say the least. Surely that must lead to something. If the man’s brother was anywhere near as remarkable as his sibling, there must be something about him online.

It was time for a little deductive work of his own.

John opened up the search engine on his computer and typed in “Mycroft.” He thought for a moment, decided that his friend hadn’t told him anything else that would be useful to add to his search, and hit enter.

John scanned the results eagerly, then leaned back into his chair, frustrated.

A bed and breakfast in America called “Blossomy Croft Hideaway.” A web page for a minor government branch that dealt with weights and measures, with a request that citizens contact a mholmes@londonmeasurementoffice.gov.uk if they discovered any rulers with “substandard” measurements. Croft, LLC, a company that made window coverings. At the top of the page, under the search bar, the search engine asked John “Did you mean: Lara Croft?”

Nothing that could possibly lead John to his friend’s brother.

He tried again, typing in “Mycroft clever” and then “Mycroft umbrella” when the previous search provided unsuccessful.

But John’s computer seemed to be as frustrated as he was. The browser crashed when he hit enter on his third request, and when John restarted it, the “M” key had gotten stuck somehow, or the search engine was acting up, or something, because he couldn’t get it to give him search results for anything with the word “Mycroft” in it.

It had been a long shot, anyway.

John dressed, and limped down outside, where he bought a sandwich from the Pret a Manger on the corner, and ate it in silence, reading a copy of _The Sun_ that someone had left behind on a chair.

He returned to his room not having spoken to anyone, not even the cashier, who had silently taken his money without really looking at him, and sat down on his bed.

John was getting tired again, even though it was still early evening and he’d only just woken up. Sleep in the Dream must not be very restful.

Might as well go back to bed then; what else did he have to do?

John undressed and prepared for sleep, setting his crutch carefully at the foot of the bed. He got in under the covers and closed his eyes, trying to relax.

He’d been tense during the entirety of his short excursion outside, his eyes darting nervously up and down the street, scanning the people walking alongside him. His friend knew more than enough about John to look him up—he even knew the exact address where John was staying. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable to think that maybe he would come by to see John.

But he hadn’t shown up, of course, and why should he? Such a remarkable person would have a thousand other (better) things to do. The Dream had been an aberration, a fantastical blip in John’s otherwise colorless existence. It was an experience that was not to be repeated.

John wrapped his hand around his pillow, telling himself to fall asleep.

He wasn’t upset. It wasn’t like he didn’t have things to do tomorrow: He’d look online to see if he could get some locum work, maybe go for a short walk in the park.

He’d be fine.

**

Walking away from Bart’s the next day with Mike by his side, John couldn’t stop himself from grinning.

“I didn’t know that you knew Sherlock Holmes,” Mike said.

Sherlock Holmes: The name was at once preposterous and unforgettable. It fit the stranger perfectly.

John knew that he should probably stop smiling so widely; it seemed to be unnerving Mike, who had already been very confused by John and Sherlock’s reunion—which had been somewhat dramatic—even more.

(Sherlock had initially put on a show of resentment, claiming to be angry at John for crafting what Sherlock described as a “scheme” to force the Collector to send Sherlock home. But this had faded when it became clear that both of them were so pleased to see the other that keeping up any pretense of fury was not possible. Besides, Sherlock had told John after they’d shouted at each other for a bit and the faux rage had cooled, there was a serial killer on the loose in London. The chance to catch a serial killer, John gathered, apparently being something Sherlock believed it was well worth Coming Back for, mystery of the windows awaiting unsolved in in the Dream or no). 

“He found something for me that I’d lost once,” John said to Mike.  

 “I thought Sherlock didn’t do those types of cases.”

John gave him an uncertain look.

“You know, the missing pets and wedding rings and so on,” Mike explained. “He always says they bore him to tears.”

“I guess he made an exception for me.”

“Oh,” Mike said, clearly more confused than ever, and didn’t ask John any more questions.

**

They moved in together.

It was every bit as glorious and infuriating and exciting and dangerous and wonderful as you might imagine.

**

They didn’t talk about the Dream.

John tried a couple of times, shortly after he’d moved in, with little success. Sherlock said it was useless to theorize about windows when he didn’t have any data about them, would not tell John about what he and the Collector had talked about after the Collector had sent John home, and ultimately said that John was boring him and refused to converse on the subject any longer.

After a while, Mrs. Hudson threw out Sherlock’s skull, and John left his crutch behind at Angelo’s.

When Angelo came to their door to return the crutch, John considered telling him _Keep it; I don’t need my Lost Thing now that I have Sherlock_ but he couldn’t bring himself to reject it.

Angelo left with a smile and a promise from John to come by his restaurant again soon.

John, closing the door behind him, stared at the crutch, running his fingers up and down the cool metal, remembering how hot the crutch had felt after he returned from the Dream to find it propped against his bed.

John wasn’t sure what to do with the thing. He considered throwing it out, but this seemed wrong; It would be careless, ungrateful to abandon his Lost Thing like so much trash—like something Harry would do. The Dream had taken him to Sherlock, after all.

In the end, John stuffed the crutch behind some coats in his closet, and tried to forget about it.

Between the cases, his blog, Sherlock’s experiments, dashing about London after murders, and the general breathless excitement was life when you lived with Sherlock, this was scarcely difficult.

And if sometimes John thought he saw someone standing behind him when he shaved, or caught a glimpse of something odd (eyes? teeth?) reflected back at him in the metallic sheen of the blade he was using to chop up vegetables for dinner?

Well, when he turned around to get a closer look, there was never anything there. 

Besides, Sherlock had been right: any idiot could find something he'd lost, but it took someone really special to discover something in the Dream that he didn't even know he'd been missing. 


End file.
